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Inference for categorical data

In August of 2012, news outlets ranging from the Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com
/national/on-faith/poll-shows-atheism-on-the-rise-in-the-us/2012/08/13/90020fd6-e57d-11e1-9739-
eef99c5fb285_story.html) to the Huffington Post (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/14/atheism-
rise-religiosity-decline-in-america_n_1777031.html) ran a story about the rise of atheism in America.
The source for the story was a poll that asked people, “Irrespective of whether you attend a place of
worship or not, would you say you are a religious person, not a religious person or a convinced
atheist?” This type of question, which asks people to classify themselves in one way or another, is
common in polling and generates categorical data. In this lab we take a look at the atheism survey and
explore what’s at play when making inference about population proportions using categorical data.

The survey
To access the press release for the poll, conducted by WIN-Gallup International, click on the following
link:

http://www.wingia.com/web/files/richeditor/filemanager
/Global_INDEX_of_Religiosity_and_Atheism_PR__6.pdf (http://www.wingia.com/web/files/richeditor
/filemanager/Global_INDEX_of_Religiosity_and_Atheism_PR__6.pdf)

Take a moment to review the report then address the following questions.

Exercise 1 In the first paragraph, several key findings are reported. Do these
percentages appear to be sample statistics (derived from the data
sample) or population parameters?

Exercise 2 The title of the report is “Global Index of Religiosity and Atheism”. To
generalize the report’s findings to the global human population, what
must we assume about the sampling method? Does that seem like a
reasonable assumption?

The data
Turn your attention to Table 6 (pages 15 and 16), which reports the sample size and response
percentages for all 57 countries. While this is a useful format to summarize the data, we will base our
analysis on the original data set of individual responses to the survey. Load this data set into R with
the following command.

download.file("http://www.openintro.org/stat/data/atheism.RData", destfile = "a

theism.RData")
load("atheism.RData")

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Exercise 3 What does each row of Table 6 correspond to? What does each row of
atheism correspond to?

To investigate the link between these two ways of organizing this data, take a look at the estimated
proportion of atheists in the United States. Towards the bottom of Table 6, we see that this is 5%. We
should be able to come to the same number using the atheism data.

Exercise 4 Using the command below, create a new dataframe called us12 that
contains only the rows in atheism associated with respondents to the
2012 survey from the United States. Next, calculate the proportion of
atheist responses. Does it agree with the percentage in Table 6? If not,
why?

us12 <- subset(atheism, nationality == "United States" & year == "2012")

Inference on proportions
As was hinted at in Exercise 1, Table 6 provides statistics, that is, calculations made from the sample
of 51,927 people. What we’d like, though, is insight into the population parameters. You answer the
question, “What proportion of people in your sample reported being atheists?” with a statistic; while
the question “What proportion of people on earth would report being atheists” is answered with an
estimate of the parameter.

The inferential tools for estimating population proportion are analogous to those used for means in the
last chapter: the confidence interval and the hypothesis test.

Exercise 5 Write out the conditions for inference to construct a 95% confidence
interval for the proportion of atheists in the United States in 2012. Are
you confident all conditions are met?

If the conditions for inference are reasonable, we can either calculate the standard error and construct
the interval by hand, or allow the inference function to do it for us.

inference(us12$response, est = "proportion", type = "ci", method = "theoretica

l",
success = "atheist")

Note that since the goal is to construct an interval estimate for a proportion, it’s necessary to specify
what constitutes a “success”, which here is a response of "atheist" .

Although formal confidence intervals and hypothesis tests don’t show up in the report, suggestions of
inference appear at the bottom of page 7: “In general, the error margin for surveys of this kind is ±
3-5% at 95% confidence”.

Exercise 6 Based on the R output, what is the margin of error for the estimate of

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the proportion of the proportion of atheists in US in 2012?

Exercise 7 Using the inference function, calculate confidence intervals for the
proportion of atheists in 2012 in two other countries of your choice, and
report the associated margins of error. Be sure to note whether the
conditions for inference are met. It may be helpful to create new data
sets for each of the two countries first, and then use these data sets in
the inference function to construct the confidence intervals.

How does the proportion affect the margin of

error?
Imagine you’ve set out to survey 1000 people on two questions: are you female? and are you left-
handed? Since both of these sample proportions were calculated from the same sample size, they
should have the same margin of error, right? Wrong! While the margin of error does change with
sample size, it is also affected by the proportion.

Think back to the formula for the standard error: SE = √‾ ‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾

p(1 − p)/n‾ . This is then used in the formula
for the margin of error for a 95% confidence interval: ME = 1.96 × SE = 1.96 × √‾ ‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾
p(1 − p)/n‾ .
Since the population proportion p is in this ME formula, it should make sense that the margin of error
is in some way dependent on the population proportion. We can visualize this relationship by creating
a plot of ME vs. p.

The first step is to make a vector p that is a sequence from 0 to 1 with each number separated by
0.01. We can then create a vector of the margin of error ( me ) associated with each of these values of
p using the familiar approximate formula (ME = 2 × SE ). Lastly, we plot the two vectors against
each other to reveal their relationship.

n <- 1000
p <- seq(0, 1, 0.01)
me <- 2 * sqrt(p * (1 - p)/n)
plot(me ~ p, ylab = "Margin of Error", xlab = "Population Proportion")

Exercise 8 Describe the relationship between p and me .

Success-failure condition
The textbook emphasizes that you must always check conditions before making inference. For
inference on proportions, the sample proportion can be assumed to be nearly normal if it is based
upon a random sample of independent observations and if both np ≥ 10 and n(1 − p) ≥ 10. This
rule of thumb is easy enough to follow, but it makes one wonder: what’s so special about the number
10?

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The short answer is: nothing. You could argue that we would be fine with 9 or that we really should be
using 11. What is the “best” value for such a rule of thumb is, at least to some degree, arbitrary.
However, when np and n(1 − p) reaches 10 the sampling distribution is sufficiently normal to use
confidence intervals and hypothesis tests that are based on that approximation.

We can investigate the interplay between n and p and the shape of the sampling distribution by using
simulations. To start off, we simulate the process of drawing 5000 samples of size 1040 from a
population with a true atheist proportion of 0.1. For each of the 5000 samples we compute p̂ and then
plot a histogram to visualize their distribution.

p <- 0.1
n <- 1040
p_hats <- rep(0, 5000)

for(i in 1:5000){
samp <- sample(c("atheist", "non_atheist"), n, replace = TRUE, prob = c(p, 1-
p))
p_hats[i] <- sum(samp == "atheist")/n
}

hist(p_hats, main = "p = 0.1, n = 1040", xlim = c(0, 0.18))

These commands build up the sampling distribution of p̂ using the familiar for loop. You can read
the sampling procedure for the first line of code inside the for loop as, “take a sample of size n with
replacement from the choices of atheist and non-atheist with probabilities p and 1 − p , respectively.”
The second line in the loop says, “calculate the proportion of atheists in this sample and record this
value.” The loop allows us to repeat this process 5,000 times to build a good representation of the
sampling distribution.

Exercise 9 Describe the sampling distribution of sample proportions at n = 1040

and p = 0.1 . Be sure to note the center, spread, and shape.
Hint: Remember that R has functions such as mean to calculate
summary statistics.

Exercise 10 Repeat the above simulation three more times but with modified sample
sizes and proportions: for n = 400 and p = 0.1 , n = 1040 and
p = 0.02, and n = 400 and p = 0.02. Plot all four histograms together
by running the par(mfrow = c(2, 2)) command before creating the
histograms. You may need to expand the plot window to accommodate
the larger two-by-two plot. Describe the three new sampling
distributions. Based on these limited plots, how does n appear to affect
the distribution of p̂ ? How does p affect the sampling distribution?

Once you’re done, you can reset the layout of the plotting window by using the command
par(mfrow = c(1, 1)) command or clicking on “Clear All” above the plotting window (if using

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RStudio). Note that the latter will get rid of all your previous plots.

Exercise 11 If you refer to Table 6, you’ll find that Australia has a sample proportion
of 0.1 on a sample size of 1040, and that Ecuador has a sample
proportion of 0.02 on 400 subjects. Let’s suppose for this exercise that
these point estimates are actually the truth. Then given the shape of
their respective sampling distributions, do you think it is sensible to
proceed with inference and report margin of errors, as the reports does?

On your own
The question of atheism was asked by WIN-Gallup International in a similar survey that was conducted
in 2005. (We assume here that sample sizes have remained the same.) Table 4 on page 13 of the
report summarizes survey results from 2005 and 2012 for 39 countries.

1. Answer the following two questions using the inference function. As always, write out the
hypotheses for any tests you conduct and outline the status of the conditions for inference.

a. Is there convincing evidence that Spain has seen a change in its atheism index between 2005
and 2012?
Hint: Create a new data set for respondents from Spain. Form confidence intervals for the true
proportion of athiests in both years, and determine whether they overlap.

b. Is there convincing evidence that the United States has seen a change in its atheism index
between 2005 and 2012?

2. If in fact there has been no change in the atheism index in the countries listed in Table 4, in how
many of those countries would you expect to detect a change (at a significance level of 0.05)
simply by chance?
Hint: Look in the textbook index under Type 1 error.

3. Suppose you’re hired by the local government to estimate the proportion of residents that
attend a religious service on a weekly basis. According to the guidelines, the estimate must
have a margin of error no greater than 1% with 95% confidence. You have no idea what to
expect for p. How many people would you have to sample to ensure that you are within the
guidelines?
Hint: Refer to your plot of the relationship between p and margin of error. Do not use the data
set to answer this question.

This is a product of OpenIntro that is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike

3.0 Unported (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0). This lab was written for OpenIntro
by Andrew Bray and Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel.

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